Crappy days are here again
The skies above are
drear again
So let’s sing a song of fear again
Crappy days are here again.
Since there’s no election on for a while—and, when there is, the
economy will be the Obama administration’s responsibility—it would
hardly seem to make sense for the media to be as gleeful as they
have been in recent weeks to see in the economic downturn a rerun
of the Great Depression. True, they like the idea of former
President Bush being cast in the role of Herbert Hoover and
President Obama in that of Franklin D. Roosevelt, but the electoral
benefits of the comparison are dubious and, at best, a long way
off. No, I think they just like the mythology of the Great
Depression in the same way that they liked the mythology of Vietnam
at the height of the Iraq War. Nothing rings the media’s bell like
the prospect of history repeating itself—although history rarely if
ever does in any meaningful way. But the opportunity to pretend
that it does gives them the further opportunity to pretend that
they understand the new things and can explain them to the rest of
us by comparing them to the old ones.
For those with a serious interest in the media’s mythology of
the Depression, I can recommend Amity Shlaes’s book The
Forgotten Man, which is a corrective to it, but here I am more
concerned with one small part of that mythology, which is the myth
of “escapism.” As A. O. Scott characterized it in an interesting
article titled “Reality Can Be Escapist, Too,” which ran in the
New York Times around Christmastime, this was the
idea:
that Americans all went to the movies because the movies gave
them what they needed. On every Main Street the Bijou or the
Biograph showed double features that helped ease the sting of
desperation and want. Hard-pressed, ordinary folks gratefully lost
themselves in satiny, soigné comedies whose very titles—Trouble
in Paradise, Easy Living—hinted of a glamorous,
alluring world. There were also tough, socially conscious pictures,
a lot of them produced by Warner Brothers and quite a few starring
James Cagney. The Public Enemy, Angels With Dirty
Faces—stories of crime, poverty and punishment delivered,
especially once the Production Code came into force in 1934, with
redemptive, morally affirming endings.
In fact, as Mr. Scott points out, movie attendance fell during
the early years of the Depression and only began to recover in
1934. Never mind. Everybody knows, or thinks he knows, that
Hollywood got us through the Depression by producing all those
Busby Berkeley or Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals or patriotic
affirmations of one sort or another that allowed audiences worn
down by the sufferings of actual poverty and unemployment or the
fear of same to spend their few remaining pennies in order to
escape them, if only in imagination. That is what would admit them
into what must have seemed to them an ideal world of glamour,
wealth, and beauty that made them forget about the reality
of their lives.
The problem with this belief lies in the word reality.
No reality, no escape from reality. The assumption is that misery
is real and glamour and the happiness it implies are unreal.
Nothing but an escape. But who is to say that fear and suffering
are more “real” than wealth and happiness? Certainly not the
audiences of the 1930s, for whom it would have been but a poor
“escape” to contemplate for 90 minutes or so a felicity that they
believed to be fanciful and unreal. On the contrary, it must have
been just because they believed that the good things of this world
were as real, and therefore as likely to come their way as the bad
things, that they must have kept going to those musicals—which
were, in any case, hardly blind to the hard times the country was
enduring. Busby Berkeley’s “Remember My Forgotten Man” production
number that ended Gold Diggers of 1933 was at least as
memorable as the jokey but truncated “We’re in the Money” that
began it.
The New York Times’s Mr. Scott couldn’t quite figure
out what was escapist and what wasn’t, concluding that, although
audiences “have a hunger to see reality depicted,” their idea of
reality is, well, a bit unreal. As a result, “every movie, really,
is an escape into someone else’s story.” This seems to me to be an
attempt to fudge the question of “reality,” which, judging by the
movies I see, must be at least as unfamiliar to the moviegoers of
today—and of the last couple of decades of prosperity as well—as it
was to those of the Depression. A couple of weeks later, the
Times also delivered the happy news that, in spite of
recession, movie box office receipts for 2008 were down by less
than 1 percent over 2007 (though attendance was down 5 percent) and
that “the results were largely attributable to superheroes”—
either reinvented ones like The Dark Knight (the top
moneymaker) or newcomers like Iron Man (the runner-up).
Four computer-animated movies delivered giant returns, with
Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar: Escape
2 Africa and Horton Hears a Who all in the
top 10. A new franchise about a well-behaved teenage vampire was
born to tiny Summit Entertainment in Twilight. And never
underestimate a well-executed marketing campaign and a dollop of
nostalgia: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal
Skull overcame dreary reviews to sell $317 million in tickets
and place third in the top 10…
So, no escapism for us then, it seems! This kind of stuff makes
Gold Diggers of 1933 look like the grittiest of realism.
And, turning to the prestige movies, I noticed that when the Oscar
nominations were announced a couple of weeks later, the two movies
thought to have the best chance of carrying away the Best Picture
award, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Slumdog
Millionaire, were both out-and-out fairy tales.
I SORT OF LIKED the latter—certainly better than any of the
other nominees, which included more liberal mythologizing about
Watergate (Frost Nixon) and the gay rights movement
(Milk) as well as yet another Hollywood effort (The
Reader) to squeeze some pathos, this time on behalf of an
illiterate German sexpot and concentration camp guard, out of the
Holocaust. All of them were escapist in their own way—a way that
was not characteristic of the 1930s—and none of them more
so than Slumdog Millionaire. People get confused, I
suppose, because that movie throws in some scenes of torture and
the horrific abuse of children, along with those of the teeming
slums of Bombay. But the central characters, we know, will not be
kept down, and the movie’s version of reality is getting,
as Philip Larkin put it in his great poem “Toads,” “The fame and
the girl and the money/All at one sitting.”
“Toads” is about work, as opposed to unemployment, but it also
takes the gloomy approach to reality which knows that the
fame and the girl and the money are not for the likes of P. Larkin
or his readers and which seems to be much more characteristic of
prosperous times (“Toads” was written in the 1950s) than it is of
economic hardship. Perhaps we simply incline to believe that
reality is not what we experience today—which, indeed,
always has something of an air of unreality about it—but what lies
just around the corner, waiting for us. If so, it would fit well
with the media’s pretensions to predict the future, their supposed
knowledge of the things that are hidden, and their contempt for
unlettered folks who don’t know any better than to engage in
“escapism” to unreality.
In any case, if the myth of popular “escapism” of the 1930s
lingers, like a bad smell, it must be because the media see some
misleading lesson to be drawn from it. Here, for instance, is what
Frank Rich of the New York Times characterized as “one
subtle whiff of the Great Depression” in Barack Obama’s inaugural
address:
His injunction that “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves
off” was a paraphrase of the great songwriter Dorothy Fields, who
wrote that lyric for Swing Time (1936), arguably the best
of the escapist musicals Hollywood churned out to lift the nation’s
spirits in hard times. But Obama yoked that light-hearted evocation
of Astaire and Rogers to a call for sacrifice that was deliberately
somber, not radiantly Kennedyesque.
What, exactly, do you suppose Mr. Rich supposes is
“escapist”—or, for that matter, “somber”—about the injunction to
“Pick yourself off, Dust yourself off, Start all over again”? To me
it sounds, simply, realistic.
